After the foregoing introductory remarks it is now time to pass on to the

study of our subject itself. But the introduction, where we still are, can in this

respect do no more than sketch for our apprehension a conspectus of the

entire course of our subsequent scientific studies.

But since we have spoken of

art as itself proceeding from the absolute Idea, and have even pronounced its

end to be the sensuous presentation of the Absolute itself, we must proceed,

even in this conspectus, by showing, at least in general, how the particular

parts of the subject emerge from the conception of artistic beauty as the presentation

of the Absolute. Therefore we must attempt, in the most general

way, to awaken an idea of this conception.

It has already been said that the content of art is the Idea, while its form is

the configuration of sensuous material. Now art has to harmonize these two

sides and bring them into a free reconciled totality. The first point here is the

demand that the content which is to come into artistic representation should

be in itself qualified for such representation. For otherwise we obtain only

a bad combination, because in that case a content ill-adapted to figurativeness

and external presentation is made to adopt this form, or, in other words,

material explicitly prosaic is expected to find a really appropriate mode of

presentation in the form antagonistic to its nature.

The second demand, derived from the first, requires of the content of art that it

be not anything abstract in itself, but concrete, though not concrete in the sense

in which the sensuous is concrete when it is contrasted with everything spiritual

and intellectual and these are taken to be simple and abstract. For everything

genuine in spirit and nature alike is inherently concrete and, despite its universality,

has nevertheless subjectivity and particularity in itself. If we say, for example,

of God that he is simply one, the supreme being as such, we have thereby only

enunciated a dead abstraction of the sub-rational Understanding. Such a God,

not apprehended himself in his concrete truth, will provide no content for art,

especially not for visual art. Therefore the Jews and the Turks have not been able

by art to represent their God, who does not even amount to such an abstraction

of the Understanding, in the positive way that the Christians have. For in

Christianity God is set forth in his truth, and therefore as thoroughly concrete

in himself, as person, as subject, and, more closely defined, as spirit. What he is

as spirit is made explicit for religious apprehension as a Trinity of Persons, which

yet at the same time is self-aware as one. Here we have essentiality or universality,

and particularization, together with their reconciled unity, and only such unity

is the concrete. Now since a content, in order to be true at all, must be of this

concrete kind, art too demands similar concreteness, because the purely abstract

universal has not in itself the determinate character of advancing to particularization

and phenomenal manifestation and to unity with itself in these.

Now, thirdly, if a sensuous form and shape is to correspond with a genuine

and therefore concrete content, it must likewise be something individual,

in itself completely concrete and single. The fact that the concrete accrues

to both sides of art, i.e. to both content and its presentation, is precisely the

point in which both can coincide and correspond with one another; just as,

for instance, the natural shape of the human body is such a sensuously concrete

thing, capable of displaying spirit, which is concrete in itself, and of

showing itself in conformity with it. Therefore, after all, we must put out of

our minds the idea that it is purely a matter of chance that to serve as such a

genuine shape an actual phenomenon of the external world is selected. For art

does not seize upon this form either because it just finds it there or because

there is no other; on the contrary, the concrete content itself involves the factor

of external, actual, and indeed even sensuous manifestation. But then in

return this sensuous concrete thing, which bears the stamp of an essentially

spiritual content, is also essentially for our inner [apprehension]; the external

shape, whereby the content is made visible and imaginable, has the purpose of

existing solely for our mind and spirit. For this reason alone are content and

artistic form fashioned in conformity with one another. The purely sensuously

concrete—external nature as such—does not have this purpose for the sole

reason of its origin. The variegated richly coloured plumage of birds shines

even when unseen, their song dies away unheard; the torch-thistle, which

blooms for only one night, withers in the wilds of the southern forests without

having been admired, and these forests, jungles themselves of the most

beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the most sweet-smelling and aromatic

perfumes, rot and decay equally unenjoyed. But the work of art is not so

naïvely self-centred; it is essentially a question, an address to the responsive

breast, a call to the mind and the spirit.

Although illustration by art is not in this respect a matter of chance, it

is, on the other hand, not the highest way of apprehending the spiritually

concrete. The higher way, in contrast to representation by means of the sensuously

concrete, is thinking, which in a relative sense is indeed abstract, but

it must be concrete, not one-sided, if it is to be true and rational. How far a

specific content has its appropriate form in sensuous artistic representation,

or whether, owing to its own nature, it essentially demands a higher, more

spiritual, form, is a question of the distinction which appears at once, for

example, in a comparison between the Greek gods and God as conceived by

Christian ideas. The Greek god is not abstract but individual, closely related

to the natural [human] form. The Christian God too is indeed a concrete

personality, but is pure spirituality and is to be known as spirit and in spirit.

His medium of existence is therefore essentially inner knowledge and not the

external natural form through which he can be represented only imperfectly

and not in the whole profundity of his nature.

But since art has the task of presenting the Idea to immediate perception

in a sensuous shape and not in the form of thinking and pure spirituality as

such, and, since this presenting has its value and dignity in the correspondence

and unity of both sides, i.e. the Idea and its outward shape, it follows

that the loftiness and excellence of art in attaining a reality adequate to its

Concept will depend on the degree of inwardness and unit in which Idea and

shape appear fused into one.

In this point of higher truth, as the spirituality which the artistic formation

has achieved in conformity with the Concept of spirit, there lies the basis

for the division of the philosophy of art. For, before reaching the true Concept

of its absolute essence, the spirit has to go through a course of stages, a

series grounded in this Concept itself, and to this course of the content which

the spirit gives to itself there corresponds a course, immediately connected

therewith, of configurations of art, in the form of which the spirit, as artist,

gives itself a consciousness of itself.

This course within the spirit of art has itself in turn, in accordance with its

own nature, two sides. First, this development is itself a spiritual and universal

one, since the sequence of definite conceptions of the world, as the definite

but comprehensive consciousness of nature, man, and God, gives itself artistic

shape. Secondly, this inner development of art has to give itself immediate

existence and sensuous being, and the specific modes of the sensuous being

of art are themselves a totality of necessary differences in art, i.e., the particular

arts. Artistic configuration and its differences are, on the one hand, as

spiritual, of a more universal kind and not bound to one material [e.g. stone

or paint], and sensuous existence is itself differentiated in numerous ways;

but since this existence, like spirit, has the Concept implicitly for its inner

soul, a specific sensuous material does thereby, on the other hand, acquire a

closer relation and a secret harmony with the spiritual differences and forms

of artistic configuration.

However, in its completeness our science is divided into three main

sections:

First, we acquire a universal part. This has for its content and subject both

the universal Idea of artistic beauty as the Ideal, and also the nearer relation

of the Ideal to nature on the one hand and to subjective artistic production

on the other.

Secondly, there is developed out of the conception of artistic beauty a particular

part, because the essential differences contained in this conception

unfold into a sequence of particular forms of artistic configuration.

Thirdly, there is a final part which has to consider the individualization of

artistic beauty, since art advances to the sensuous realization of its creations

and rounds itself off in a system of single arts and their genera and species.

(i) The Idea of the Beauty of Art or the Ideal

In the first place, so far as the first and second parts are concerned, we must at

once, if what follows is to be made intelligible, recall again that the Idea as the

beauty of art is not the Idea as such, in the way that a metaphysical logic has to

apprehend it as the Absolute, but the Idea as shaped forward into reality and

as having advanced to immediate unity and correspondence with this reality.

For the Idea as such is indeed the absolute truth itself, but the truth only in its

not yet objectified universality, while the Idea as the beauty of art is the Idea

with the nearer qualification of being both essentially individual reality and

also an individual configuration of reality destined essentially to embody and

reveal the Idea. Accordingly there is here expressed the demand that the Idea

and its configuration as a concrete reality shall be made completely adequate

to one another. Taken thus, the Idea as reality, shaped in accordance with the

Concept of the Idea, is the Ideal.

The problem of such correspondence might in the first instance be understood

quite formally in the sense that any Idea at all might serve, if only the

actual shape, no matter which, represented precisely this specific Idea. But in

that case the demanded truth of the Ideal is confused with mere correctness

which consists in the expression of some meaning or other in an appropriate

way and therefore the direct rediscovery of its sense in the shape produced.

The Ideal is not to be thus understood. For any content can be represented

quite adequately, judged by the standard of its own essence, without being

allowed to claim the artistic beauty of the Ideal. Indeed, in comparison with

ideal beauty, the representation will even appear defective. In this regard it

may be remarked in advance, what can only be proved later, namely that the

defectiveness of a work of art is not always to be regarded as due, as may be

supposed, to the artist’s lack of skill; on the contrary, defectiveness of form

results from defectiveness of content. So, for example, the Chinese, Indians,

and Egyptians, in their artistic shapes, images of gods, and idols, never get

beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form. They could not

master true beauty because their mythological ideas, the content and thought

of their works of art, were still indeterminate, or determined badly, and so did

not consist of the content which is absolute in itself. Works of art are all the

more excellent in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their

content and thought. And in this connection we are not merely to think, as

others may, of any greater or lesser skill with which natural forms as they exist

in the external world are apprehended and imitated. For, in certain stages

of art-consciousness and presentation, the abandonment and distortion of

natural formations is not unintentional lack of technical skill or practice, but

intentional alteration which proceeds from and is demanded by what is in

the artist’s mind. Thus, from this point of view, there is imperfect art which

in technical and other respects may be quite perfect in its specific sphere, and

yet it is clearly defective in comparison with the concept of art itself and the

Ideal.

Only in the highest art are Idea and presentation truly in conformity with

one another, in the sense that the shape given to the Idea is in itself the absolutely

true shape, because the content of the Idea which that shape expresses

is itself the true and genuine content. Associated with this, as has already

been indicated, is the fact that the Idea must be determined in and through

itself as a concrete totality, and therefore possess in itself the principle and

measure of its particularization and determinacy in external appearance. For

example, the Christian imagination will be able to represent God in human

form and its expression of spirit, only because God himself is here completely

known in himself as spirit. Determinacy is, as it were, the bridge to appearance.

Where this determinacy is not a totality emanating from the Idea itself,

where the Idea is not presented as self-determining and self-particularizing,

the Idea remains abstract and has its determinacy, and therefore the principle

for its particular and solely appropriate mode of appearance, not in itself,

but outside itself. On this account, then, the still abstract Idea has its shape

also external to itself, not settled by itself. On the other hand, the inherently

concrete Idea carries within itself the principle of its mode of appearance and is therefore its own free configurator. Thus the truly concrete Idea alone produces

its true configuration, and this correspondence of the two is the Ideal.

(ii) Development of the Ideal into the Particular Forms

of the Beauty of Art

But because the Idea is in this way a concrete unity, this unity can enter the

art-consciousness only through the unfolding and then the reconciliation

of the particularizations of the Idea, and, through this development, artistic

beauty acquires a totality of particular stages and forms. Therefore, after studying

artistic beauty in itself and on its own account, we must see how beauty

as a whole decomposes into its particular determinations. This gives, as the

second part of our study, the doctrine of the forms of art. These forms find their

origin in the different ways of grasping the Idea as content, whereby a difference

in the configuration in which the Idea appears is conditioned. Thus

the forms of art are nothing but the different relations of meaning and shape,

relations which proceed from the Idea itself and therefore provide the true

basis for the division of this sphere. For division must always be implicit in

the concept, the particularization and division of which is in question.

We have here to consider three relations of the Idea to its configuration.

(a) First, art begins when the Idea, still in its indeterminacy and obscurity,

or in bad and untrue determinacy, is made the content of artistic shapes.

Being indeterminate, it does not yet possess in itself that individuality which

the Ideal demands; its abstraction and one-sideness leave its shape externally

defective and arbitrary. The first form of art is therefore rather a mere search

for portrayal than a capacity for true presentation; the Idea has not found

the form even in itself and therefore remains struggling and striving after

it. We may call this form, in general terms, the symbolic form of art. In it the

abstract Idea has its shape outside itself in the natural sensuous material from

which the process of shaping starts and with which, in its appearance, this

process is linked. Perceived natural objects are, on the one hand, primarily

left as they are, yet at the same time the substantial Idea is imposed on them

as their meaning so that they now acquire a vocation to express it and so are

to be interpreted as if the Idea itself were present in them. A corollary of this

is the fact that natural objects have in them an aspect according to which

they are capable of representing a universal meaning. But since a complete

correspondence is not yet possible, this relation can concern only an abstract

characteristic, as when, for example, in a lion strength is meant.

On the other hand, the abstractness of this relation brings home to consciousness

even so the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena, and the

Idea, which has no other reality to express it, launches out in all these shapes,

seeks itself in them in their unrest and extravagance, but yet does not find

them adequate to itself. So now the Idea exaggerates natural shapes and the

phenomena of reality itself into indefiniteness and extravagance; it staggers

round in them, it bubbles and ferments in them, does violence to them, distorts

and stretches them unnaturally, and tries to elevate their phenomenal

appearance to the Idea by the diff useness, immensity, and splendour of the

formations employed. For the Idea is here still more or less indeterminate and unshapable, while the natural objects are thoroughly determinate in their

shape.

In the incompatibility of the two sides to one another, the relation of the

Idea to the objective world therefore becomes a negative one, since the Idea,

as something inward, is itself unsatisfied by such externality, and, as the inner

universal substance thereof, it persists sublime above all this multiplicity of

shapes which do not correspond with it. In the light of this sublimity, the

natural phenomena and human forms and events are accepted, it is true, and

left as they are, but yet they are recognized at the same time as incompatible

with their meaning which is raised far above all mundane content.

These aspects constitute in general the character of the early artistic pantheism

of the East, which on the one hand ascribes absolute meaning to even

the most worthless objects, and, on the other, violently coerces the phenomena

to express its view of the world whereby it becomes bizarre, grotesque,

and tasteless, or turns the infinite but abstract freedom of the substance [i.e.,

the one Lord] disdainfully against all phenomena as being null and evanescent.

By this means the meaning cannot be completely pictured in the expression

and, despite all striving and endeavour, the incompatibility of Idea and

shape still remains unconquered.—This may be taken to be the first form of

art, the symbolic form with its quest, its fermentation, its mysteriousness, and

its sublimity.

(b) In the second form of art which we will call the classical, the double

defect of the symbolic form is extinguished. The symbolic shape is imperfect

because, (i) in it the Idea is presented to consciousness only as indeterminate

or determined abstractly, and, (ii) for this reason the correspondence of

meaning and shape is always defective and must itself remain purely abstract.

The classical art-form clears up this double defect; it is the free and adequate

embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appropriate to the Idea itself

in its essential nature. With this shape, therefore, the Idea is able to come into

free and complete harmony. Thus the classical art-form is the first to afford

the production and vision of the completed Ideal and to present it as actualized

in fact.

Nevertheless, the conformity of concept and reality in classical art must

not be taken in the purely formal sense of a correspondence between a content

and its external configuration, any more than this could be the case with the

Ideal itself. Otherwise every portrayal of nature, every cast of features, every

neighbourhood, flower, scene, etc., which constitutes the end and content of

the representation, would at once be classical on the strength of such congruity

between content and form. On the contrary, in classical art the peculiarity

of the content consists in its being itself the concrete Idea, and as such the

concretely spiritual, for it is the spiritual alone which is the truly inner [self].

Consequently, to suit such a content we must try to find out what in nature

belongs to the spiritual in and for itself. The original Concept itself it must be

which invented the shape for concrete spirit, so that now the subjective Concept—

here the spirit of art—has merely found this shape and made it, as a

natural shaped existent, appropriate to free individual spirituality. This shape,

which the Idea as spiritual—indeed as individually determinate spirituality—

assumes when it is to proceed out into a temporal manifestation, is the

human form. Of course personification and anthropomorphism have often been maligned as a degradation of the spiritual, but in so far as art’s task is to

bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner, it must get involved

in this anthropomorphism, since spirit appears sensuously in a satisfying way

only in its body. The transmigration of souls is in this respect an abstract idea

and physiology should have made it one of its chief propositions that life in

its development had necessarily to proceed to the human form as the one and

only sensuous appearance appropriate to spirit.

But the human body in its form counts in classical art no longer as a merely

sensuous existent, but only as the existence and natural shape of the spirit, and

it must therefore be exempt from all the deficiency of the purely sensuous and

from the contingent finitude of the phenomenal world. While in this way the

shape is purified in order to express in itself a content adequate to itself, on

the other hand, if the correspondence of meaning and shape is to be perfect,

the spirituality, which is the content, must be of such a kind that it can express

itself completely in the natural human form, without towering beyond and

above this expression in sensuous and bodily terms. Therefore here the spirit

is at once determined as particular and human, not as purely absolute and

eternal, since in this latter sense it can proclaim and express itself only as

spirituality.

This last point in its turn is the defect which brings about the dissolution

of the classical art-form and demands a transition to a higher form, the third,

namely the romantic.

(c) The romantic form of art cancels again the completed unification of the

Idea and its reality, and reverts, even if in a higher way, to that difference and

opposition of the two sides which in symbolic art remained unconquered.

The classical form of art has attained the pinnacle of what illustration by art

could achieve, and if there is something defective in it, the defect is just art

itself and the restrictedness of the sphere of art. This restrictedness lies in the

fact that art in general takes as its subject-matter the spirit (i.e. the universal,

infinite and concrete in its nature) in a sensuously concrete form, and classical

art presents the complete unification of spiritual and sensuous existence as

the correspondence of the two. But in this blending of the two, spirit is not in

fact represented in its true nature. For spirit is the infinite subjectivity of the

Idea, which as absolute inwardness cannot freely and truly shape itself outwardly

on condition of remaining moulded into a bodily existence as the one

appropriate to it.

Abandoning this [classical] principle, the romantic form of art cancels

the undivided unity of classical art because it has won a content which goes

beyond and above the classical form of art and its mode of expression. This

content—to recall familiar ideas—coincides with what Christianity asserts

of God as a spirit, in distinction from the Greek religion which is the essential

and most appropriate content for classical art. In classical art the concrete

content is implicitly the unity of the divine nature with the human, a unity

which, just because it is only immediate and implicit, is adequately manifested

also in an immediate and sensuous way. The Greek god is the object

of naïve intuition and sensuous imagination, and therefore his shape is the

bodily shape of man. The range of his power and his being is individual and

particular. Contrasted with the individual he is a substance and power with

which the individual’s inner being is only implicitly at one but without itself  possessing this oneness as inward subjective knowledge. Now the higher

state is the knowledge of that implicit unity which is the content of the classical

art-form and is capable of perfect presentation in bodily shape. But this

elevation of the implicit into self-conscious knowledge introduces a tremendous

difference. It is the infinite difference which, for example, separates man

from animals. Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions, he is not

confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes conscious of them, recognizes

them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process of digestion, into

self-conscious science. In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and

immediate character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal,

he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit.

Now if in this way what was implicit at the previous stage, the unity of

divine and human nature, is raised from an immediate to a known unity,

the true element for the realization of this content is no longer the sensuous

immediate existence of the spiritual in the bodily form of man, but instead

the inwardness of self-consciousness. Now Christianity brings God before

our imagination as spirit, not as an individual, particular spirit, but as absolute

in spirit and in truth. For this reason it retreats from the sensuousness

of imagination into spiritual inwardness and makes this, and not the body,

the medium and the existence of truth’s content. Thus the unity of divine

and human nature is a known unity, one to be realized only by spiritual

knowing and in spirit. The new content, thus won, is on this account not

tied to sensuous presentation, as if that corresponded to it, but is freed

from this immediate existence which must be set down as negative, overcome,

and reflected into the spiritual unity. In this way romantic art is the

self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art

itself.

We may, therefore, in short, adhere to the view that at this third stage the

subject-matter of art is free concrete spirituality, which is to be manifested as

spirituality to the spiritually inward. In conformity with this subject-matter,

art cannot work for sensuous intuition. Instead it must, on the one hand,

work for the inwardness which coalesces with its object simply as if with

itself, for subjective inner depth, for reflective emotion, for feeling which,

as spiritual, strives for freedom in itself and seeks and finds its reconciliation

only in the inner spirit. This inner world constitutes the content of the

romantic sphere and must therefore be represented as this inwardness and

in the pure appearance of this depth of feeling. Inwardness celebrates its triumph

over the external and manifests its victory in and on the external itself,

whereby what is apparent to the senses alone sinks into worthlessness.

On the other hand, however, this romantic form too, like all art, needs an

external medium for its expression. Now since spirituality has withdrawn

into itself out of the external world and immediate unity therewith, the sensuous

externality of shape is for this reason accepted and represented, as in

symbolic art, as something inessential and transient; and the same is true of

the subjective finite spirit and will, right down to the particularity and caprice

of individuality, character, action, etc., of incident, plot, etc. The aspect of

external existence is consigned to contingency and abandoned to the adventures

devised by an imagination whose caprice can mirror what is present to

it, exactly as it is, just as readily as it can jumble the shapes of the external world and distort them grotesquely. For this external medium has its essence and

meaning no longer, as in classical art, in itself and its own sphere, but in the

heart which finds its manifestation in itself instead of in the external world

and its form of reality, and this reconciliation with itself it can preserve or

regain in every chance, in every accident that takes independent shape, in all

misfortune and grief, and indeed even in crime.

Thereby the separation of Idea and shape, their difference and inadequacy

to each other, come to the fore again, as in symbolic art, but with this essential

difference, that, in romantic art, the Idea, the deficiency of which in the symbol

brought with it deficiency of shape, now has to appear perfected in itself as

spirit and heart. Because of this higher perfection, it is not susceptible of an

adequate union with the external, since its true reality and manifestation it

can seek and achieve only within itself.

This we take to be the general character of the symbolic, classical, and

romantic forms of art, as the three relations of the Idea to its shape in the

sphere of art. They consist in the striving for, the attainment, and the transcendence

of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty.